The study of communicative competence has extended its scope to investigate more than internalizing grammar, vocabulary or other linguistic devices since language development has been evaluated with competence on longer discourse units such as narratives in recent years (Kang, 2004). Therefore, there has been a renovated interest in the study of narrative development over the past thirty years. This is due to the level of information it maintains concerning social, discursive and traditional condition of people’s life (Bruner, 1991; Quasthoff, 1997). There are no known studies which have been conducted to examine the effect of early childhood education on narrative skills of young Turkish children. Thus, present study is aimed to fill this gap in the field of early childhood education.

How can we identify a good story? A substantial body of research suggests that coherence is the forefront indicator of a good story. Coherence refers to the structure of a story in which sequential events must be linked in a meaningful way (Hudson & Shapiro, 1991). Children are capable of telling basic patterns for familiar events and sequences even though they are not able to describe the sequence of events accurately until about age four (Owens, 2005).

Telling stories is one of the most common activities in preschools since there are formal story telling times in curriculum. Therefore, teachers read storybooks to children and there are informal story telling times such as stories that a child tells to adults to explain an errant behavior or to each other during a play. In spoken or written forms, children are frequently confronted with a broad range of narratives in their everyday lives and in their academic activities (Bloom et al, 2003; Hicks, 1991).

Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry,18(1), 1-21. Bloome, D., Katz, L. Champion, T. (2003). Young children’s narratives and ideologies of language in classrooms. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 19, 205-223. Hicks, D. (1991). Kinds of narrative: Genre skills among first graders from two communities. In A. McCabe & C. Peterson (Eds.), Developing narrative structure (pp. 55–88). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Hudson, J. & Shapiro, L. (1991). From knowing into telling: The development of children’s scripts, stories, stories, and personal narratives. In A. McCabe and C. Peterson (Eds.) Developing Narrative Structure (pp. 89-136). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Kang, Y. J. (2004). Telling a coherent story in a foreign language: analysis of Korean EFL learners’ referential strategies in oral narrative discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 1975-1990. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you? New York:Puffin Books. Owens, R. E. (2005). Language development: An introduction (4th Ed.). New York: Allyn and Bacon. Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1983). Developmental psycholinguistics: Three ways of looking at a child’s narrative. New York: Plenum. Quasthoff, U. (1997). An interactive approach to narrative development. In Michael Bamberg. Narrative development: Six approaches. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.